I think the changes in this week’s build are on the right path, but not quite there.
Wintertide
On paper, this seems like a decent replacement for the old Wintertide. It’s not terribly exciting but to be fair, neither was the old one.
However, the buff is consumed when an Icicle or Glacial Spike deals damage which the talent doesn’t mention. This interaction makes the talent really annoying. Without Glacial Spike, the talent buffs a single Icicle every 5 Frostbolts, making it essentially useless. If you want the buff to apply to Glacial Spike, you need to be super careful not to overflow any Icicles (that will otherwise consume the buff). This is sometimes impossible to do in practice because random Icicle procs exist (Splintering Cold talent).
Fingers of Frost
We’re seeing further reduction to Fingers of Frost’s proc rate but nothing is being done about making Ice Lance feel more meaningful. In fact, the Wintertide rework reduces the average Ice Lance damage by a substantial amount.
Even prior to this build, there were already talent setups that would only cast Ice Lance with the 20% extra damage from Wintertide. The base damage of Ice Lance is simply too low to compete with the rest of the kit.
Talent Tree
I’m always in favor of turning 2-point talent nodes into 1-point nodes. However, there also needs to be a place where to spend the extra talent point that was freed up.
Frost will soon be at the point where you simply get to take all the talents in the second tier, without having to make any choices. Second tier offers 16 points to spend (realistically only 14, since Subzero is extremely situational), compared to the 12 you need to spend.
The numbers also paint a similar picture. Frost’s spec tree allows for 1,506,962 distinct ways of spending 30 talent points, the least of any spec in the game. As a point of comparison, this number is highest for Restoration Druids, a total of 337,633,306,901 ways. In more human-approachable terms, it’s as if Frost had 13 MoP-style talent tiers while Restoration Druids had 24.
Obviously, some spec has to be at the bottom, but there’s no reason for the gap to be this wide.